Marks & Spencer has always been committed to promoting its supply chain to fulfill the environmental responsibilities in terms of compliance or exceeding compliance standards. Meanwhile, it is working towards suppliers’ self-management of supply chain environmental performance and carbon footprint and strive to improve the environmental performance of the whole supply chain. Green logistics is an important part in achieving the goal of sustainability strategy. “Responsible management of logistics” was added into the scoring criteria by IPE's CITI from the year of 2020. It’s the time to make the brand's logistics sustainability achievements to be reflected on the scores from this year.

As an important logistics partner of Marks & Spencer, Maersk undertakes the sea freight and the land transportation from factories to the ports in China. We know well that, as a multinational container integrated logistics service provider, Maersk connects and simplifies customers’ supply chain through their global end-to-end solutions. Maersk has an integrated sustainability team and net zero emission strategy continually improving their sustainability performances. This is an important factor of a strategic partnership establishment between Marks & Spencer and Maersk.

Please find the decarbonisation commitments of Maersk from its 2021 Sustainability Report:

As a large multinational enterprise, how to communicate effectively with Maersk is very important. Marks & Spencer Far East sustainability team raised the expectations of engaging Maersk to work on IPE to UK headquarter, and this was highly supported by the senior management of the logistics department in Marks & Spencer and communicated with the responsible top management in Maersk. Based on both sides’ top managements’ same high level of sustainability strategy mindset and the management of environmental impact in China, and the same management concept of further developing the green supply chain, it’s decided to further establish connection with IPE.

The consensus at the strategic level made the follow-up work progressed smoothly. We successfully organized a meeting with Maersk's business, compliance and sustainability departments and invited IPE leaders who provided professional supports. In order to support Maersk doing self-management of environmental compliance of its supply chain on IPE platform in the future, Marks & Spencer introduced in details about the expectations for the IPE work in logistics area on the meeting, expected Maersk’s China subsidiary companies can register and upgrade their IPE accounts, and then encourage its suppliers to register on IPE. IPE representatives introduced themselves in details and interpreted their vision, which helped Maersk representatives to have a deeper understanding of IPE's contribution in the process of sustainability management, understand the values of the platform. In the end of the meeting, Maersk representatives expressed the interest of continuing the follow up work. 

Registration an IPE account and upgrading to be the enterprise user is the first step of using IPE's blue eco chain to manage their supply chain. The whole work involves Maersk's China head office, its subsidiaries, and the related suppliers. The whole process includes the communications and coordination across the internal and external multiple departments. We deeply understand the difficulty and complexity of the work, Meanwhile, there’ll be more communications with suppliers in promoting the registration and violation responding or GCA. So it’s essential to nominate a special person or team to be responsible for the work in Maersk. Therefore, it was agreed at the meeting that Maersk can start with the suppliers who are related to Marks & Spencer business, then gradually expand to their self-management of their supply chain, thus Marks & Spencer will continue to collaborate with Maersk on this.

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